Re: [Flightgear-devel] McDonnell Douglas MD-11 in FGAddon

[Edward d'A. <tru...@gm...>]

On 9 September 2016 at 16:13, Thorsten Renk
<tho...@sc...> wrote:
>
> @Edward:
>
>> Let me give an example, the Ornithopter:
>>
>>     http://wiki.flightgear.org/UTIAS_Ornithopter_No.1
>>
>> It's flight model implementation using the UIUC FDM is exceptional,
>> being written by a now professor in aerospace engineering, Michael
>> Selig [1].  This is a show piece for the FlightGear project - no other
>> flight sim can come close to correctly simulating this beast.
>>
>> By Thorsten's critera, we would not only remove this aircraft from the
>> download pages, but we would knock out a huge proportion of the
>> contents of FGAddon.  The majority of the UIUC aircraft with high
>> quality FDMs would be gone.  What purpose would it serve to have the
>> FlightGear aircraft collection massively reduced?
>
> The criterion suggested was _unrated_ aircraft that seem to have _low
> quality_ whereas you're quoting an aircraft that is _unrated_ but has
> _exceptional_ quality - surely you see the difference and that I have in
> fact not suggested to move it?
>
> Also, if you know the aircraft, you could take five minutes and put a
> rating in, at which point the discussion would not arise at all - why is
> that not an option?

Because of the magnitude of the job:

[edward@localhost Aircraft]$ grep "<rating" */*-set.xml | sed
"s/\/.*//g" | sort -u | wc -l
345
[edward@localhost Aircraft]$ ls | wc -l
518

There are 173 unrated aircraft in FGAddon - mainly from very old but
interesting aircraft in which the author has long left the FlightGear
world.  To give each a fair fdm, systems, cockpit, and model rating
will require a lot of testing, investigation and time.

As for low quality, this is extremely subjective.  We have a lot of
aircraft in FGAddon that some people would describe as "low quality",
yet others would like to fly (myself included).  I don't mind playing
around with these, and patching them to continue to work, as I did
back in 2015.

The value I see in the attic is solely as a replacement for straight
out aircraft deletion.

Regards,

Edward